TRANSCENDENT AUTHORITY AND IMMANENT POWER: APPLYING NARRATIVE THEORY TO PARTS OF GENESIS AND EXODUS

Abstract

This article applies narrative theory in a tentative and exploratory way to parts of Genesis and Exodus.1 By examining the power relation which the text sets up between narrator and reader, the article argues that the narrator’s transcendent authority that is authority beyond the story is not just fused but confused with the immanent power that is power within the story of the main character in the story: God. Narratology is an approach developed in the late 1970s by the French Structuralist Gérard Genette.It may seem that using an approach applied to a modern literary genre such as the novel (Genette developed his narrative theory after studying Proust) is merely another way of importing a modern Western perspective into Ancient Near-Eastern texts, ignoring their historicity, the cultural, geographical and ideological contexts in which they were produced. Yet narrative theory is not incompatible with contextual, historical, comparative and critical approaches.